A new version of Python library Kivy has been released with an Android Emulator and innovations for organizing widgets and addons.

Kivy is an open source Python library that gives a framework for creating apps with innovative user interfaces.

You can create apps that are multi-touch, that react to gestures, and that track objects and markers. Kivy runs on Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android and IOS, and you can run the same code on all supported platforms. Raspberry Pi support was added in April after a crowdfunding drive by the Kivy team.

It makes use of OpenGL to create a standardized UI and graphics environment for Python. It's only real drawback at the moment is that it doesn't work with Python 3.

The new version of Kivy, 1.7.0, was released last week, and has some significant changes.

The support for the Android Emulator is a major improvement, and means you can now develop in Kivy for Android devices. In the official announcement of the new release, the Kivy team says that if you use python-for-android, cleaning and updating the source code should give you the latest kivy version which already supports the Android emulator (assuming it has gpu acceleration activated). The new version also supports ETC1 texture compression format, which is the standard on the Android platform.

The way Kivy’s ScrollView works has been changed, and the scrolling part is now separated as an effect, using a better physics calculation and timing. Multiple effects are available including the default DampingScrollEffect and an alternative OpacityScrollEffect. This design will let the team implement the Pull-and-release scrollview that is appearing on mobile views of gmail, twitter etc.

According to a blog post by Mathieu Virbel on TXZone about the new version:

“the scrollview doesn’t calculate anything now, it just pass the touch position to a Scroll effect. This class calculate the movement’s velocity, and the over-scroll’s distance (means how far you scrolled out of the bounds).”

Virbel also says that the Kivy team has implemented two visual effects that use the over-scroll to make the scrollview act as a damped spring. The changes also mean the scrollview fades out if the users over-scrolls too much.

Support has been added to give a way to organize user’s widgets and addons in a centralized location known as the Kivy. A tool lets users search for addons, and you can install and maintain a garden package containing widgets in your system or in your application layout. The team hopes developers will participate and share widgets with the community, and notes that there are already some garden packages available on Github.

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